Filmmaker Werner Herzog and composer/cellist Ernst Reijseger discuss their collaboration on Hearsay of the Soul, a five-channel video installation now on view at the Getty Center, as well as explore other films and the relationship between images and music.

Installed in a single gallery in the Museum's North Pavilion, Hearsay of the Soul dramatically fuses images from the distant past with contemporary experimental music. The screens slowly sweep over magnified details of small landscape etchings by Hercules Segers (about 1589–about 1638), and also features a performance filmed by Herzog of Reijseger playing the cello and musician Harmen Fraanje playing the organ in a Lutheran church in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The video echoes Herzog's approach in both his documentary work and narrative films, which often employ basic equipment and deceptively simple techniques to achieve powerful visual and emotional effects.

Ernst Reijseger. Photo: Lena Herzog

Ernst Reijseger is a Dutch cellist and composer specializing in jazz, improvised music, and contemporary classical music. He has worked with a number of noted musicians, including Louis Sclavis, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Gerry Hemingway, and Yo-Yo Ma, among others. Reijseger has also written several film scores, including scores for a number of Werner Herzog films.

Werner Herzog is the director of numerous masterpieces of the New German Cinema, including Aquirre, The Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), and Fitzcarraldo (1982), as well as the innovative documentaries Grizzly Man (2005) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). Herzog has moved seamlessly between fictional and documentary film and managed to create a diverse body of work that has become a major influence for many contemporary filmmakers and artists.

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